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I lived off-grid for a while in the 1980s. It was a beautiful experience.
I lived in a grain store offered to me for no rent. When I went there with my meagre belongings it was a spidery, dusty stone walled barn half way up a mountain. It was not a "converted barn" or any such luxury. Just a stone wall building with a thick Oak door and huge stone lintel and supports which lent the place a rather Neolithic appearance, but luckily it already had a pot-bellied stove installed....
I cleaned the place in 1 day and made it lovely.
....And that was it.
Water was pumped up from a spring under the earth. The water had to be boiled. In order to boil it, one had to cut wood, bring it home, chop it up, light the stove.
The bathroom was a Victorian bowl and jug, and a spotted mirror.
The toilet was a latrine dug in the mountainside with a plank strategically placed over it, and filled in with earth each time of use.
There was an option of bathing in the stream, but I didn't want to lace the drinking water for sheep with lavender soap, so always washed in the barn, and disposed of that "grey" water elsewhere.
No refigerator, but the walls were 2ft thick so it was never too hot in there. Certain foods nevertheless wouldn't keep. It was there that I gave up meat, and milk for practical reasons, though ate canned fish.
But oh yes it was a lovely place to live. It was magical. I'd light it with a lot of candles, and it was like a shrine. I'd get the wood stove going on those bleak rainy windy days and cook up some hot food. Wonderful dinners were cooked on that stove.
And at night I'd listen to the cows underneath me as they settled for rest. I could see them and smell them through cracks in the floor-boards.
In the early morning I'd wake up and walk outside naked and look down on swathes of mist following the river in the valley below.
My currency was candles and firewood.
It's all about mind-set. And about adaptation to current circumstances, and the magic you can discover in it.
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